Welcome back to What I’m Hearing. I’m in L.A., but congrats to my Puck colleagues in D.C. for throwing the second annual First Amendment party at the French ambassador’s residence, this year honoring NBC News legend Andrea Mitchell. Attorney General Merrick Garland showed up the night before suing Apple, and now I’m bummed I wasn’t there to ask him if he liked Killers of the Flower Moon.

I’ll be in D.C. for the Correspondents’ Dinner weekend in late April. Puck is hosting a little event with WME and Snap. Let’s connect then if you’re attending.

PSA: Sunday’s edition will be a mailbag of reader questions and (hopefully!) answers from me. Let me know if there’s something you really want to know, or if you’re interested in my take on a specific topic.

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Let’s begin…

• Taylor’s cruel sums: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour did fine on Disney+, with 4.6 million “views” worldwide in its first three days, per Disney. But C.E.O. Bob Iger didn’t pay more than $75 million to break the record as the platform's “most-watched music film.” He wanted more. Yes, it’s a long movie, most fans saw it in theaters, and we’ll see what the subscriber bump is this quarter. But, engagement-wise, this has to be seen as an early disappointment. And I’m betting that over at Netflix, there were more than a few golf claps when the Disney press release hit. An incomplete list of music film views in their first three days on Netflix (usual caveat: Netflix has far more subscribers):
  Jennifer Lopez, Halftime (6.3 million)
  Taylor Swift, Miss Americana (6.1 million)
  Blackpink, Light Up the Sky (5.1 million)
  The Greatest Night in Pop (4.8 million)
  Travis Scott, Look Mom I Can Fly (4.6 million)

  Related: Disney+ left all the “fucks” and “shits” in the Eras Tour songs, about four years after censoring the same words in Hamilton. I’d say it’s less of a double standard for Tay-Tay than a sign of how far Disney has come in allowing general-audience content on its service.

• Stuber’s next stop: Scott Stuber formally left Netflix last Friday, so he’s officially in play as a producer. The former film chief has been spotted taking meetings with several studio heads, hearing ideas for different producing arrangements, and whether to raise outside money or not. My bet is he lands at Warner Bros. with his former colleague Pam Abdy, who co-runs a studio that has been doling out deals lately like it’s 1999.
• Nobody’s watching Apple TV+, February edition: This continues to be the funniest and most underreported story in Hollywood. Nielsen’s monthly Gauge report of streaming viewership shows Apple TV+ at 0.29 percent of viewership, waaay below bottom-tier streamers Paramount+ (1.1 percent of viewership) and Pluto TV (.8 percent), and neck and neck with Discovery+ (.24 percent), a service that was largely subsumed by Max and is not marketed at all. Remember, Apple’s number includes a full month of Masters of the Air and Killers of the Flower Moon, the latest incredibly expensive programming.
• Box office over/under: I took a tough L last week on the Mark Wahlberg dog movie after a pretty strong winter run. Now it’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which is tracking at $46 million. I’ll take the under here because the last one, 2021’s highly anticipated Afterlife, only got to $44 million.

That’s a generous bid—far more than Paramount Global’s $7.7 billion market capitalization, at least before the stock price shot up on the report, and more than what most have said the studio and library are worth. But what hasn’t been mentioned is the other name on the offer letter sent to Paramount C.E.O. Bob Bakish and his committee of independent directors. According to two sources, the bid came from Apollo and Legendary Entertainment, the film and TV studio that is jointly owned by Apollo, China’s Dalian Wanda Group, and management. That’s a key fact that may say a lot about what Apollo intends to do with Paramount, if (and that’s a big if) it can pry the studio away from Shari without taking the rest of the company. Reps for Paramount, Apollo, and Legendary declined to comment.

According to one dealmaker, the Apollo idea is to potentially merge Paramount and Legendary, home to properties like Dune and Godzilla vs. Kong, into a single studio—combining the theatrical distribution capabilities of the former with the production and franchise assets of the latter. That play would potentially free Legendary from having to rely on traditional studio partners to distribute its movies. It’s basically a version of what David Ellison would like to do with the Paramount studio and his Skydance Media—though Skydance, with the involvement of Larry Ellison, David’s dad and one of the world’s richest men, is certainly a more interesting suitor than a combo P.E./China play like Legendary, even if Apollo may bring in additional partners.

Still, a Paramount-Legendary combo has benefits. Legendary’s current deal is with Sony Pictures for most films, but the company has gone through many partnerships since it was launched by investor Thomas Tull back in the mid-2000s as one of the first production outfits backed by big-time financial firms. Legendary has endured its share of ups and downs, and Tull & Co. somehow convinced Wanda to pay $3.5 billion for the company back in 2016, a year before its chairman, Wang Jianlin, was slapped around by his government and Hollywood’s China money spigot was plugged.

Legendary’s current C.E.O., Josh Grode, is a deal guy, having been a prominent transaction attorney before going full-time for a client. He and Mary Parent, the top creative executive—who, ironically, had a producer deal at Paramount before she jumped to Legendary—brought in Apollo and its $760 million in 2022, in part to reduce the Chinese influence on the company but also to grow it further. In fact, the initial Apollo press release noted that the firm “also sees strong potential M&A opportunities for the Company across a variety of media and talent categories.”

Paramount would fit that thesis. But that’s just one lane, of course. Apollo could keep Paramount separate, especially if it brings in another partner on the deal. (Enter RedBird or Skydance? The mind boggles...) And big picture, none of these scenarios seems likely to pass muster with the one person who matters: Shari.

Apollo clearly sees the studio as more flippable to a streamer or another legacy company in need of a library that includes Star Trek and Transformers. And in the meantime, Paramount or Paramount-Legendary could pursue the arms-dealer strategy that most people think Bakish should have pushed for in the first place, instead of trying to compete with Netflix.

Another problem here: What are the Redstone distribution assets worth without the studios providing content? Without the pipeline of content, CBS and MTV and Pluto TV and Paramount+ would have to license what they air. Plus, unlike other studio conglomerates—and this refers back to my scare quotes above—Paramount actually separates its film and TV assets. None of the company’s three TV studios (Paramount Television Studios, CBS Studios, and MTV Entertainment Studios) is actually a part of the Paramount Pictures film unit. So if Apollo wants to pay $11 billion for the Paramount “film and TV studio,” it’s actually not clear how the TV studio assets will be separated from the rest of their affiliated broadcast and cable networks.

It’s kind of a mess. Unsurprisingly, right after the Journal story broke, word circulated that Shari wasn’t into the bid. Then, as if on cue, the Financial Times reported last night that she “prefers” to continue negotiating the competing bid from the Ellisons, KKR, and RedBird Capital. They want the whole company, via Redstone’s National Amusements Inc., which controls nearly 80 percent of Paramount voting stock. Ellison, himself, may ultimately want just the studio and the real estate and whatever parking lot he can convert into a bitchin’ helicopter pad. But RedBird’s Gerry Cardinale just hired Jeff Shell, the former NBCUniversal C.E.O., and Shell would very much like to figure out what to do with CBS and the rest. Team Ellison may not ultimately do this deal, but I doubt they fear losing it to Apollo.

That’s why some Paramount watchers suspect the Apollo back-channeling may be running through Bakish, who might prefer to divest the studio because he’d have a better chance of keeping his job running the rest of the assets. CBS, Pluto, the cable nets, and whatever becomes of Par+ is still a business, just like Fox Corp.—with Fox News and Tubi and the broadcast network—is still a business, even after Rupert sold everything else to Disney. Bakish, like Lachlan Murdoch atop Fox, would still be a real big-boy media C.E.O., even if diminished. He’d still make eight figures and get invited to Sun Valley and the Morgan Stanley conference. And he’d probably be subject to fewer analysts questioning his every move. By contrast, Bakish being retained by the Ellison people is about as likely as Shohei Ohtani having no idea that his best friend was “stealing” $4.5 million to pay gambling debts.

It’s true that what Shari “prefers” is becoming less and less important as the Paramount situation becomes more dire. But she’s still the controlling shareholder; she could change her mind about a fire sale, or she could decide to sell the whole thing to David Ellison or Byron Allen or Mohammed bin Salman or the ghost of her father, Sumner. It’s her choice.

The Ellison bid for National Amusements does seem like the best option for her to save face. It’s a sale of the whole sloppy enchilada to another “family” (albeit a family backed by P.E. and including the guy who owns one of the Hawaiian islands) that actually wants to be in the film and TV business. But that raises its own issues (discussed by my partner Bill Cohan here), not least of which is that any deal that benefits NAI or Shari personally at the expense of Paramount shareholders would be subject to close scrutiny and possible litigation. But there are no great options here, only potential lifelines, and the clock is ticking.

Correction: Due to an editing error, Morgan Stanley was referred to as JPM in a Sunday item. That should have been MS, of course.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or $4.5 million to bet on sports? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.